Many of the puppeteers that are part of the online community are involved in Christian ministries. For those who fall under this category, the Fellowship of Christian Puppeteers is hosting their annual conference at Winthrop University in South Carolina on July 23-27. Anyone in the area may find this an educational opportunity to refine your puppetry skills, learn new skills or perhaps gain encouragement and inspiration for your ministry as you use this powerful medium. Information and registration is available here.

Monkey Boys Productions, working from designs by James Wojtal, built these seven puppets for a TV commercial for Mexican Televison. The above video is a movement test filmed during the build. What I thought was especially cool, and should be noted, about the puppetry in the clip, was that each animal has its own unique dance style - a very nice detail and a subtle clue into the personalities of the characters. Great stuff!

You may also want to check out this video of an unfinished giraffe puppet showing off his dance moves before falling victim to a violent crime (just kidding - watch the video).

Amy Harder over at PuppetryLab.com is doing some great work. Puppetry Lab focuses on puppet performance, and to my knowledge, is really the only site out there that has approached the subject full force. There are a few puppetry blogs and static web pages that have briefly discussed performance or puppetry for television and so forth, but none with the resolute determination of actually providing instruction for solid puppeteering technique and performance skills. Puppetry Lab is slowly but surely doing just that.

Personally, I was excited to read in one of Amy’s recent posts, and I quote,

To date, PuppetryLab has primarily focused on puppetry theory and specific movement techniques. But there is so much more to creating a lifelike, believable character than simply the movement of the puppet. If you have excellent puppetry technique but ignore simple acting basics and neglect character development, your audience will not fully engage in your performance and will quickly lose interest.

Puppetry Lab plans to visit and revisit the two subjects - acting basics and character development - as an ongoing project. Both are very important pieces to a memorable performance, whether you are working with a script or improvising.

One thing that I really appreciate about Puppetry Lab is that the tone of the instruction and the site makes it very clear that when you put a puppet on your hand, you become a performer, an actor. Just as a stage or screen actor perfects their performance skills, studies for a particular part, meditates on how to convey certain emotions in certain scenes, develops his character, etc., so should the puppeteer. It’s a process, and the more work that goes into that process, the better the final result or, in this case, performance.

So, bottom line, check out PuppetryLabs.com! You’ll be glad you did.